By Joseph Tulloch
At a long table just outside the monastery of Mar Behnam in Iraq’s Nineveh plains, a group of young people are painting. They produce small pictures featuring symbols of Iraqi culture: an oud, a glass of mint tea, a mosque, a church, the Ziggurat of Ur.
The event has been organised by the ‘Mesopotamia Heritage Truck’ initiative, which tours Iraq offering lessons and workshops on the country’s culture and history.
“Our goal is to help people understand how diverse Iraq is,” says Muthana al-Khoury, Heritage Truck project manager. “There have been so many different groups living here together for so long, and we are still here today”.
Re-weaving the social fabric
The truck has travelled all over Iraq, but the majority of the villages it visits are in the north of the country – the area which, in 2014, was suddenly captured by so-called Islamic State.
Members of Iraq’s many minority groups – Christians, Kurds, Yazidis, Shabak and others – were forced to flee the terrorist group, and their holy sites were desecrated.
Now, some eight years after ISIS’ defeat, some of these minorities have begun to return. The task of re-weaving Iraq’s social fabric, however, remains a challenging one.
“When we go into a village with different religious groups, we encourage everyone to join in”, says Al-Khoury. “We try to make them all engage with each other, participate in the activities together.”
These activities are both theoretical and practical, spanning everything from lessons on Iraqi history and archaeology to workshops on sculpture and painting.
“The goal,” says Pascal Maguesyan, director of Mesopotamia Heritage, the French organisation which established the Heritage Truck project in 2024, “is to get both children and adults interested in the country’s heritage, to ensure that future generations preserve it.”
The ‘first writing in the world’
Iraq, which occupies much of ancient Mesopotamia, is often referred to as the ‘cradle of civilisation’.
Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians all flourished there, and the land also gave birth to cuneiform, the earliest writing system anywhere in the world, which was developed toward the end of the fourth millennium BC. Among the lessons offered by the heritage truck are introductory classes in this ancient script.
“People love these types of lesson,” says Al-Khoury. “In traditional schools in Iraq, you never have a chance get to do art, music, or anything like that.”
As well as offering participants new experiences, however, the Heritage Truck courses also aim to give them a sense of the variety and depth of Iraq’s history. And, seeing the enthusiasm of the group of schoolchildren as they finish their paintings, it’s hard not to share the conviction that, when it comes to reconstructing and reconciling a nation, culture is just as vital as economics or politics.
“Here in Iraq, we had the first writing anywhere in the world”, Al-Khoury says with a smile. “We want the new generations to be aware of that. We want them to be proud.” – Vatican News
